陈情表

李密 had served the state of Shu. After its fall, Emperor Wu of Jin summoned him to office, and he wrote this memorial to decline. Fatherless from infancy and raised by his grandmother, he asks to stay with her until she dies: without her he would not have lived, and without him she would have no one to care for her in her last years. The emperor was moved and granted his request.

The idiom 日薄西山 "the sun sinking behind the western hills" comes from its description of the grandmother. A Song-dynasty saying holds that anyone who can read it without weeping is not a filial son.